Gareth Snell
MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central · Labour (Co-op) · United Kingdom
“My hon. Friend is touching on something really important, because the other part of the issue is the length of time that people have to sit in front of a screen in order to get to the front of the queue.”
“The Minister says that there will be a review within six months, but can she be clearer to give us certainty? Will it start within six months or will it have concluded within six months? If it starts within six months, how long does she anticipate it will take?”
“I would like to declare an interest as the vice-chair of the Unison group of MPs. The Minister rightly says that it is a false choice between good employment relations or growing the economy.”
“The Minister has not touched on the cap on fines for big companies. Does she think that is sufficient? Amazon’s turnover this year was £30 billion—that is 30,000 million. The maximum fine that it could get in a calendar year is half a million pounds—one sixty-thousandth of its turnover.”
“When the Labour party went through a terrible time with our own antisemitism crisis, the hon. Gentleman was a staunch friend of the Jewish members of my party, and I know that many of them remember him fondly for that.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend on making a wonderful speech. He will know, because he is from Leeds, that one of the people spending most of their time propagating that sort of virulent antisemitism is the deputy leader of the Green party in Leeds, who once posted a list of British people—some Jewish—saying “bought and sold by Israel”, pur…”
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“Then, rather naughtily, those six-bedroom HMOs become eight-bedroom HMOs with a retrospective application, at which point the council says, “Well, we only really have to consider the additional two bedrooms, because they had the right to do the six in the first place.” That puts unimaginable strain on communities, such as the community in Claridge Road who now have exactly that—an eight-bedroom HMO sitting within a residential family area. As my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm) said, HMOs have a really important part to play in the housing mix in towns and cities, but they have to be in the right place and controlled. I have asked my council how many HMOs we have, but it cannot tell me; it does not keep a register, because it has never had to.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd, and I welcome the Minister to her new role. In this debate, I have found myself feeling slightly envious, listening to hon. Members around the Chamber talk about the work their councils are undertaking to achieve better regulation of HMOs. Sadly, in Stoke-on-Trent we are far behind others in that process. My residents in Hartshill and Basford, in Penkhull, in Fenton and in Birches Head are seeing many three-bedroom family homes being converted to six-bedroom HMOs.”
“In a polycentric city such as Stoke-on-Trent, we have six town centres, as well as many other areas of trade. One big thing that affected us under the last Conservative Government—we also had a Conservative council in Stoke-on-Trent—was the closure of five of the six town-centre police stations, which made those town centres feel unsafe, and the complete hollowing out of our bus network, which meant that many people could not get to the town centres to spend their hard-earned money in the shops. Could the Minister set out what this Government are doing to reverse those terrible trends under the last Government?”
“Stoke-on-Trent has the second highest number of children in care per capita—second only to Blackpool. The items that the Minister has outlined are welcome for children in my city, but because we have that high per-capita number, the costs are such that more money is spent on children in care than can be found for those who are transitioning out of care. What is available to local authorities with acute demand that are in distress, so that as a vast number of young people leave care and go forward in life, we are able to put social support around them?”
“To make steel in this country, we need ceramics. To build houses in this country, we need ceramics. Five of the eight industrial strategy growth sectors require ceramics. Ahead of the launch of the British industrial competitiveness scheme, might there be any interim relief from energy prices for energy-intensive industries?”
“I congratulate and thank the Minister for his work on this; I know how much of his time it is taking. Further to the points made by my hon. Friends the Members for Eltham and Chislehurst (Clive Efford) and for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), and the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis), there is a perversity in the people who were failed by the state potentially being asked to repay 40% of their compensation to the same state that failed them. The Minister has clearly set out that that is in line with policy; is he willing to stand at that Dispatch Box and state, categorically, that that is fair? If he cannot say that it is fair, will he at least undertake to again raise this issue with the Treasury, so that those people who were failed by the state are not then penalised by the state?”
“Much like my hon. Friend in Staffordshire, I have constituents who are under the same management company. Even when trying to use mechanisms to see things, such as by a section 21 request under the Landlord and Tenancy Act 1985, they have been ignored and dismissed, or often are given incorrect information. Does my hon. Friend hope, like I do, that when the Minister sums up, he will talk a little bit about the technical measures for holding these organisations to account and why they are not working so well? Enforcement of the existing rules should be enough. Whether or not those should be changed, there are mechanisms available that my constituents are trying to access that are simply not working.”
“We are only human, and we ought to hold at the forefront of our minds the fact that mistakes have been made—I think we would all agree on that; I do not think anyone can say, hand on heart, that everything has gone perfectly up to this point—but the key thing is how we learn from that and prevent it from happening again. That, Madam Deputy Speaker, is where I will draw my remarks to a conclusion.”
“How will we get to a point, in this Parliament, where we can be sure that every Member of Parliament—regardless of which political party they come from, the position they hold, their standing or their length of service—is free from such political interference, oversight and spying? How can we ensure that no more Members are sanctioned, as the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green was? He has talked eloquently to the House on numerous occasions about the disruption to his life. For us to do our job properly, we must have confidence in the people around us and the advice we receive from officials, and we have to be certain that the processes that are in place to keep us safe are doing their job. Ultimately, we all come here to do a job, and to do it well.”
“They said that in the future, they might ask for such information and we would say no, and we are clearly at that point today. We all invest a lot of time and energy into this job, and into our staff. We are at the mercy of the vetting services to make sure that the staff who work for us are looked into properly. We just do not know, for instance, whether operatives from other hostile states are active in staffing units. We can pretend we do, but we honestly do not. I hope we will get some answers from the Minister about how we have got to this point, but what I want to understand is how will we make sure that the same thing does not happen again.”
“They were using that terminology, but unfortunately the political faces of that Administration were not. I will not get into the rights and wrongs of that, but it is clear that there has been inconsistency in the language applied to China throughout this period. If I were more legally minded, I would say that that may have led to the current situation, in which the CPS is saying one thing and the DNSA is saying something else, and we are getting the interpretation of an illustrious former Attorney General, the right hon. and learned Member for Torridge and Tavistock (Sir Geoffrey Cox). By the way, I remember the debate in November 2017 when we argued for a Humble Address. Many Conservative Members said that it was a terrible idea to publish Government information, and it could never be done because it would undermine that information.”
“He is a gentleman of the utmost standing and principle, and I cannot imagine the horrors that he has been through and how much they have disrupted his life. We should keep that at the forefront of our minds in this debate. We have had a complex relationship with China for the past decade. I cannot be the only one who is old enough to remember the pictures of the President of China pulling pints in the Plough with the former Prime Minister, who was subsequently the Foreign Secretary when some of what we are talking about was happening. We have not had a consistent approach to China publicly. I say “publicly”, because the evidence we have heard from various Opposition Members this evening makes it quite clear that officials in the last Government were naming China as a threat.”
“The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) touched on several relevant points. There was a time in this House when a Member coming under attack and finding themselves on the wrong end of something was a moment of unification for us, and we would come together to find a way forward collectively. It should be of great regret to us all that following the events that happened to the hon. Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns) and the right hon. Member for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat), we are throwing political rocks at one another about meetings that may or may not have happened over the last six or seven years. I do not know the hon. Lady, but I know the right hon. Gentleman.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend on her appointment to her ministerial role. It is encouraging to hear again that the Government intend to legislate to put the covenant on a statutory footing, but she will know that enforcement of the covenant is as important as the statute from which it derives. Across the country, some organisations voluntarily put the covenant at the core of what they do, and it is a tenet of the principles on which they make decisions. In other places, it is a certificate that lots of people have signed for show. How will the Government make sure that the new law is enforced properly to eradicate the postcode lottery, which none of us wants to see, from public services?”
“This debate has focused on the business element of the co-operative sector, but could the Minister take back to the Department the work on co-operative solutions that happens in social settings? My constituency was one of the few that had riots last year. The Co-operative party’s community power work demonstrates that we can bring communities together and deal with the tensions and sense of purposelessness by giving people a genuine stake in their community so that they can shape the services they use. There is no business element to that, but the social benefit is huge. When the Minister goes back to his Department, can he implore it to look at co-operative solutions to and models for the modern tensions that we face in some communities? The co-operative movement has the answers that we are looking for.”
“If their away team is not banned, the question should be: what is different between the Maccabi fans and the Young Boys fans, and what is it that we want to talk about?”
“It was reported over the weekend that, in August, a legal observer to one of the protests was arrested simply for wearing a Star of David because it was considered to be antagonising. Now, with the decision to ban the Maccabi fans from coming to the UK, there is a genuine cumulative effect on what it means for Jewish people in this country, and the effect on the families of Jewish people in this country who watch their friends and family being tortured about whether or not they have a role in this country any more. We should all be significantly aware of that. If this ban is allowed to go ahead, there will be this challenge. The game after the Maccabi game is with the Swiss-based Young Boys, whose fans have been involved in two riots, including hospitalisations.”
“I should draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, as a governor of a sixth-form college in Stoke-on-Trent and as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on sixth form education. The V-levels provide an exciting opportunity for vocational qualifications, and the Secretary of State is right to praise colleges, but she will know that those same colleges are deeply worried about the defunding of BTECs and what that means for student choice in the 2026-27 academic year. Will she give a commitment from the Dispatch Box that BTEC funding will continue until V-levels are in place, and if she cannot, can she explain what young people accessing further education next year will be able to look to before they are in place?”
“I gently point out to the Minister that there is not just a rich history of manufacturing and industry, but potentially a rich future, too. We are still an area of the country that makes many things, whether that is high-tech agricultural machinery at JCB or fine porcelain ceramics in the city of Stoke-on-Trent. The roads and infrastructure that come with that could be the growth point for north Staffordshire, which would help deliver on the Government’s economic agenda and allow the infrastructure to develop to build the homes that we need. It is win, win, win, if the Minister can confirm that we can have the upgrades we need.”
“I thank the Minister for being so generous in giving way. Thirteen years ago, when I was leader of the local authority in Newcastle, I joined the Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire local enterprise partnership board. This project was on the books then. The sclerotic nature of the last Government meant that it had not progressed at all, and I hate to think what investment has been lost. While I welcome the commitment that the Minister is making to future potential, will he at least recognise that we could be talking about 20 years after this was first raised by Members who are in the House today? We need a relatively swift conclusion of effort so that we at least know which projects we can green-light around the area for the jobs, the growth and the homes that we need.”
“May I thank you, Mr Speaker, for your leadership on this? The exquisite Speaker’s House collection that you personally commissioned is made proudly in Stoke-on-Trent by Duchess China. I am sure that the House will be pleased to know that it is in stock, reasonably priced and available in time for Christmas. This place is a great showcase for British talent and skills. Although I accept my hon. Friend’s answer, there is more that we can do. Through him, I encourage the Commission to ensure that whenever a tender is offered for crockery, giftware or tableware in this place, it looks not just at value for money but at the social value of supporting British manufacturers wherever possible.”
“The streets around Birches Head and Sneyd Green have become an impenetrable labyrinth of road closures, diversions and blockades while Severn Trent Water digs up the roads to replace important infrastructure, causing great disruption to local people. The New Roads and Street Works Act 1991 and the Traffic Management Act 2004 should give local authorities the ability to co-ordinate some of those works, but in this case it simply is not happening, and those Acts now seem deficient in doing what they are meant to do. Could the Leader of the House arrange for either a statement or a debate in Government time on how we can ensure the co-ordination of those works to reduce the impact on local people?”
“When the unlawful legacy Act shut down 200 investigations into the deaths of British soldiers, people across the country, including in my constituency, will have thought that was desperately unfair, and not just on those individuals but on the families and victims. Can the Secretary of State assure me and my constituents that under the new legacy Act there will be opportunities for those victims finally to get the justice they deserve?”
“I congratulate the Minister on his well-deserved elevation to the Front Bench. He has worked quite hard with the ceramic sector on this issue. Energy-intensive industries, such as ceramics, are at the mercy of an international gas market over which very few countries have direct control, but one of the things that could help is looking at electricity costs. May I therefore encourage the Minister, in his new role, to consider expanding eligibility for the supercharger scheme so that energy-intensive industries, such as ceramics, can benefit from the support available until the supercharger scheme comes online in 2027?”
“I am enjoying the right hon. Gentleman’s one-man show on why he should be leader of the Conservative party. He will get no argument from me on the fact that we need to reduce the number of foreign national offenders in our prisons—I agree that that is what we do need to do, as does my party. However, between 2019 and 2024 under his Government, the numbers increased by 12%. He knows that it is a difficult thing to achieve; he knows there is no simple answer, because if there was, his party would have done it when it was in government. Rather than offering simple magic-wand solutions, what is he actually suggesting that we do to deliver a reduction? If he knows the answer, why did he not do it when he was in government?”
“The shadow Minister is reading out a series of crimes that are reprehensible, and no one in this House would want to see the individuals who commit such crimes having anything but the book thrown at them. In the spirit and tone in which he has read that list out, his Government oversaw a 2.6% charge rate for people who were arrested for rape. Does he want to say anything to the House about that particular damning figure? There are people today who have not been let out of prison early, because they never even got there in the first place. What does he say to that?”
“Well, that wouldn’t be the Tory party, would it, Madam Deputy Speaker? What the shadow Secretary of State seems not to understand is that workers cannot turn up to a trade union and go, “I’ve got a problem. Can I join and get representation, please?”. Almost every union in this country requires a qualifying period to get the representation he talks about—the idea that this is a closed shop is just nonsense.”
“The hon. Lady makes good points in some parts of her speech, but not in others. The point of a trade union representative—or any representative who goes with an individual to a disciplinary process—is not to advise on the particulars of the worker’s skillset, but to ensure that processes are followed and the worker’s rights are protected. I fully understand what she says about accountancy, but are there people in her professional organisation who can give her employment rights advice? Disciplinaries relate to employees’ rights, not their professional skillsets.”
“I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I am a member of Unison and the GMB, and during the election I received financial support from trade unions. One thing I found when I was a trade union official was that it was not necessarily people who were not confident in asserting their own rights. A number of workers simply did not know what their rights were. Oddly enough, employers were not running around handing out little laminated cards saying, “Here are all the rights you can ask me for.” If employers are not made to tell them their rights, how else are employees meant to find out?”
“I wonder whether my hon. Friend agrees that when Conservative Members oppose day one rights, they are not really worried about the day on which the rights start; they are actually opposed to the rights. That is why many of them cannot muster an argument that is about more than, as he says, spreadsheet efficiency.”
“The opportunity is there with the local plan, but it just might need a shove from the centre to help get it over the line.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey. I commend to the Minister the draft local plan in Stoke-on-Trent, which is very bold. It recognises that there is an acute waiting list for housing in Stoke-on-Trent, and that we need to build the houses that we need for local people, so that generations of families can live there. The council is taking some tough decisions and building on pieces of land that residents would not ordinarily want built on, but that is one of the trade-offs for having a growing city. The Minister and I spoke about an urban development corporation covering Hanley, in Stoke-on-Trent, to allow land assembly in order to bring derelict brownfield sites back into use and build the homes that we need. Is that a conversation that we can pick up again?”
“While the Minister is talking about green-belt land, I want to talk about the Stoke-on-Trent local plan. Berryhill Fields in my constituency has been given a reprieve from previous Conservative plans to build. Other green spaces in Stoke-on-Trent could be protected if there was a way of passporting the Homes England compulsory purchase powers to local authorities so that they could do land assembly in built-up urban areas where landowners who have no interest in building houses in the city are sitting on great swathes of land, which are just causing nuisance and antisocial behaviour. That would help with housebuilding, but also with urban and economic regeneration. If the Minister looked at that, Stoke-on-Trent would probably be up for being a pilot area and seeing what could be done.”
“If one of my hon. Friend’s constituents in Dulwich or West Norwood were to get a train to my constituency in Longton—there is a tenuous connection—they would also find that station to be entirely inaccessible. Unlike her case, funding was allocated to Longton train station through the transforming cities fund, but the local authority then decided to reallocate that funding to block paving outside one of the town halls for public realm improvements. Perhaps when she is successful in getting the funding that her station deserves, she will support a campaign to ringfence that funding and protect it so that it cannot be siphoned off for other local projects that often do not support the accessibility for which the funding was designed.”
“While the Minister has his diary out, I wonder whether he could facilitate a similar meeting for me with the Rail Minister regarding Longton train station.”
“My constituents—like yours, I am sure, Madam Deputy Speaker—want to have ready access to cash and banking facilities, but when the Lloyds bank in Stoke town closes its doors later this year, the town will have no banking facilities. The Link assessment has determined that the three sub-post offices just under a mile from the town centre are sufficient to provide services. May we have a debate in Government time, or a statement from the relevant Minister, on the criteria for access to banking hubs so that, as the Government roll out more, we can ensure that they hit urban communities as well as rural ones?”
“I think the whole House can welcome the investment that has been announced today. We know that going through early education makes young people more ready for school, and closing the school readiness gap also closes the attainment gap later on in education settings. When I visit primary schools across Stoke-on-Trent Central, the one thing they tell me is that they are bursting at the seams—they are full. Will the Minister set out what conversations he has had, either inside the Department or between his Department and the Treasury, about identifying the capital funding necessary to ensure that schools have the high-quality physical spaces in which these nurseries will be based?”
“I obviously declare an interest as my wife is a Member of the House of Lords—and a salaried Minister, for good fortune. The shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster recognises that the Labour party won an election but is talking about deals that go back further. Does he not realise that he risks undermining the Salisbury-Addison convention, which says that manifesto commitments should pass through the other place without hindrance? I know that the hon. Gentleman aspires to be back in government one day. Does he not recognise that by doing down that convention, he risks his own future legislative programme should the Conservatives ever get back into power in future?”
“I thank the shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for his indulgence. He says that Lords amendment 1 makes a significant improvement to the Bill. Why, then, when it was brought forward in the other place by Lord Grocott as a private Member’s Bill and in this place by David, now Lord, Hanson, did the Conservatives block it and say that it was a terrible idea?”
“I thank the shadow Minister for giving way to me for a third time. I presume what he is suggesting is more about the title and the style than about a seat in the legislature. He will know that under the 2011 royal warrant that granted the justices of the Supreme Court the style and title of Lord, that did not come with any connection whatsoever to the legislature. So there is a way of doing what he suggests that does not require the Lords amendment: it can be done via royal warrant through an Order in Council.”
“My hon. Friend is making an excellent point. The work that Lord Grocott did on this in the other place is commendable, but it was sadly blocked time and again by the Conservatives. On my hon. Friend’s point about the youngest hereditary peer and the number of general elections that may have passed before he will have seen himself out, by no longer being a Member of the House of Lords he would regain his right to vote and stand in general elections, so if he wished to return to Parliament, there would be plenty of places in this House that he could try for.”
“I am sorry to intervene again, but this is an important point. Since the general election, there have been 21 nominees to the other place. That would have counted for half the entire hereditary peerage group of the Conservative party, had the Leader of the Opposition taken the opportunity to promote them to life peerages. By not doing so, the Conservatives have chosen to keep those hereditary peers out.”
“The characterisation is often unfair and the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire belittles his own position as a Member of this House.”
“Yes, she is very good. I thank my hon. Friend for that. I want to start by addressing some of the points that the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) made—he has left. His characterisation of the House of Lords is grossly unfair. He characterised everybody who is a Member as being some sort of pocket-stuffing hanger-on. I think that exposes more about his particular brand of petty grievance politics than it does about the actual calibre of the individuals down at the end of the corridor. Regardless of party affiliation or whether they are independent or bishops, the Members I have come across—in Committee or Joint Committee work, or in delegations when I was previously in the House are—good people who want to see the nation benefit and our country thrive and see good politics and good governance.”
“I appreciate that some of those have been resignation honours from previous Prime Ministers—and there were a few to get through because of the way their party operated—but there have been 21. At any point, the former Prime Ministers could have said, “We would like to consider giving those to members of the hereditary group who are not able to continue.” There have been a number of appointees who were not part of a resignation honours list, and again, the Conservative party did not take the opportunity to say to Earl Howe, “We are going to make sure that you can continue.””
“The times when I have sat and watched the House of Lords, because their sitting hours are later, I have seen that the challenges that come from the bishops, the Cross Benchers and the members of the Conservative and Liberal parties, regardless of how they reached there, have been thoughtful and well considered, and long may that continue. I do not think that is diminished by virtue of the fact that we say to a small group of those who have a right in the House of Lords, “Your route into this place was an irregularity, and we are seeking to sort that.” The shadow Paymaster General, the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), disputed my figure. There have been 21 appointments to the House of Lords who have had the Conservative Whip.”
“The idea that this will remove any form of opposition in the upper House is simply incorrect—it does not hold water. The other idea that good scrutiny of legislation in the House of Lords can somehow happen only by virtue of the application of the minds of the hereditary peers is equally incorrect. Some of the best challenges to Government in this Parliament have come from Members of the House of Lords who have been appointed. It does not necessarily mean they are less likely to be independent because they are not there by virtue of a hereditary peerage. I genuinely do not see that for myself.”
“It is slightly unfair, and it is a categorisation of their own politics that they seek to find ways to frustrate the Bill because they have no option for themselves. On the somewhat spuriously suggestion that this is a way of neutering opposition in the other place, the number of Conservative peers, even after the expulsion of the hereditaries, will still make them the largest party in the House of Lords, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) pointed out. The Labour party is currently the third largest party in the House of Lords, after the Cross Benchers. Even after the removal of some of the Cross Benchers who sit by virtue of a hereditary peerage, they will still only be slightly behind the Labour party.”
“He has tried to get to the point when there could have been an opportunity over the past two decades for Members who are here by virtue of the hereditary principle to be phased out over time. At every opportunity, it was blocked by the Conservative party; at every opportunity, it was talked out. When the Bill was introduced in this place, first by David Hanson and then by John Spellar, the Conservative party opposed it, saying that the principle was wrong and there was not enough reform. I therefore feel that it is slightly disingenuous now to propose something that the Conservatives have opposed for the past two decades as their solution to the problem that they themselves created by not accepting it in the first place.”
“Without getting drawn into the debate on the rights and wrongs, I will say that if the Scottish National party had wanted an elected second Chamber, it could have had one in the Scottish Parliament but chose not to. There are things about the way in which our democracy works that mean the SNP Members come down here simply to have a pop at this place for their grievance politics in Scotland. Frankly, if the SNP spent more time thinking about how it could help the nation rather than its petty nationalism, we might be in a better place as a country and things would be better in Scotland. In a point relating to amendment 1, as my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Shaun Davies) rightly pointed out, Lord Grocott has proposed this Bill in the House of Lords numerous times over the past 20 years.”